A Story is Not a Life

A story, I see, is not a life. A story must follow a line; the telling must begin and end. A life, on the contrary, would be impossible to fix in time, for it does not begin within itself, and it does not end.

-Wendell Berry, A World Lost, 149.

Pigs is Pigs

A peasant who merely says, “I have five pigs; if I kill one I shall have four pigs,” is thinking in an extremely simple and elementary way; but he is thinking as clearly and correctly as Aristotle or Euclid. But suppose he reads or half-reads newspapers and books of popular science. Suppose he starts to call one pig the Land and another pig Capital and a third pig Exports, and finally brings out the result that the more pigs he kills the more he possesses; or that every sow that litters decreases the number of pigs in the world. He has learnt economic terminology, merely as a means of becoming entangled in economic fallacy. It is a fallacy he could never have fallen into while he was grounded in the divine dogma that Pigs is Pigs.

-G. K. Chesterton, "Logic and Lawn Tennis"

Memories

My memories of Uncle Andrew are thus an accumulation of little pictures and episodes, isolated from one another, unbegun and unended. They are vividly colored, clear in outline, and spare, as if they belong to an early age of the world when there were not too many details. Each is like the illuminated capital of a page I cannot read, for in my memory there is no tissue of connection or interpretation. As a child, I either was interested or I was not; I either understood or I did not. Mostly, even when I was interested, I did not understand. I had perhaps no inclination to explain my elders to myself...Perhaps it was from thinking about [Uncle Andrew] after his death, discovering how much I remembered and how little I knew, that I learned that all human stories in this world contain many lost or unwritten or unreadable pages and that the truth about us, though it must exist, though it must lie all around us everyday, is mostly hidden from us, like birds’ nests in the woods.

-Wendell Berry, A World Lost, 61-62.

Weird Noises

This island is always full of weird noises...There’s been times I’ve woken up in the middle of the night when there wasn’t a breath of air stirring and could have sworn I heard fiddles or somebody plucking on a harp or God only knows what. But I’m used to it.

-Frederick Buechner, The Storm, 182.

Wild Strawberries

Are Wild Strawberries really wild? Will they scratch an adult, will they snap at a child?

-Shel Silverstein, A Light in the Attic, 66.

Whether Thou Readest or Writest

Whether thou readest or writest, whether thou watchest or sleepest, let the voice of love [to Christ] sound in thine ears; let this trumpet stir up thy soul: being overpowered with this love, seek Him on thy bed whom thy soul desireth and longeth for.

-Saint Jerome, quoted by my brother on my answering machine

Both, Both, My Girl

Both, both, my girl: By foul play, as thou say’st, were we heaved thence, But blessedly holp hither.

-William Shakespeare,The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2.


He had first appeared in print when, to his surprise, The New Yorker accepted one of his stories while he was still in his twenties and then maybe five or six others over the next few years. They were ironic, graceful little glimpses of people falling in and out of love in Manhattan, where he had often fallen in and out of love himself, and their style was spare, translucent, wistful. Eventually a collection of them was published under the title Both, Both, My Girl, from Prospero’s answer to Miranda when she asks him if it was by blessed means or foul that they were washed up on their enchanted island. “Both, both is what all those stories are about,” he told his wife at the time. “It is also the story of my life.”

-Frederick Buechner,The Storm, 4.

Imagination

The trouble is I have always been able to imagine almost anything. It has been my downfall.

-Frederick Buechner, The Storm, 4.

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Domesticated Despair

At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.

-Flannery O'Connor, “Novelist and Believer,” The Christian Imagination, 162.

February

In February it will be
My snowman's anniversary
with cake for him and soup for me!
Happy once
happy twice
happy chicken soup with rice.

-Maurice Sendak

January

In January it's so nice
while slipping on the sliding ice
to sip hot chicken soup with rice.
Sipping once
sipping twice
sipping chicken soup with rice.

-Maurice Sendak

Settling for Less

The great sin of most of the stories of popular culture—in film, television, novels, and the like—is not that they are violent or obscene or godless, but that they waste our time. Since I can hear only so many stories in my life, why settle for anything less than the best ones?

-Daniel Taylor, "In Praise of Stories," The Christian Imagination, ed. Leland Ryken, 417.